“But when you have a single compound, single receptor, single activity, that naturally leads to addiction and that naturally leads to side effects. And that’s part of the concerns when you see things like the opioid crisis when you’re seeing a lot of other types of pharmaceutical led crisis within the world. And I believe that’s one of the major reasons why we’re seeing an emergence of plant medicine.

The history of plant-based medicine is obviously something that humans have lived with for thousands of years. There’s evidence that it goes back to up to 60,000 years where we’re using plants for medicine.

Why did we stop using plant medicine? Some of it is technical, some of it is economical.

One of the major gaps of plant medicine, or at least till now, was lack of standardization. When we look at pharmaceuticals, when we look at medicine, we like to have accurate dose, reputable products, consistent products. There was a lack of standardization and to some extent, that was marketed as sort of snake oil.

Lack of clinical evidence, real world evidence.

Lack of understanding of the synergistic effect of plant medicine meaning multiple compounds working on multiple receptors or multiple mechanisms of action, and that’s what we call polypharmacology. We’re not used to that in what we call western medicine. It’s single compound, single target, and therefore more addiction, therefore more side effects.

I am not sure if you guys know the story, but there is a huge theory around actually the activity or the involvement of the Rockefellers. The Rockefellers being oil guys used synthetic compounds or believed in the opportunity of synthetic oil derived compounds that they can patent. And that is really the emergence of western medicine or what we call allopathic medicine. And through that process, it’s what we call the Rockefeller medicine men. They went out there and they started educating the physicians to prescribe single compound patentable synthetic drugs, what we call chemical drugs.

But when you have a single compound, single receptor, single activity, that naturally leads to addiction and that naturally leads to side effects. And that’s part of the concerns when you see things like the opioid crisis, when you’re seeing a lot of other types of pharmaceutical led crisis within the world.

And I believe that’s one of the major reasons why we’re seeing an emergence of plant medicine.

We’re also seeing similar trends within Chinese medicine. Chinese medicine is growing at a massive rate in post COVID. There’s a lot of drivers that is increasing the value of Chinese medicine.

Something that I found interesting when I was doing my research for this presentation was there is a correlation between higher income, higher education levels, and more use of plant medicine.

I would’ve personally thought it’s the other way around. I would’ve thought it would be the developing countries that are more used to using the cepa medicine, but the trend is the other way. And I think the world and the population and the social drivers are actually leading to that as well.

The concept of single compound, single receptor is historic. It’s chemical, it’s synthetic. Polypharmacology, it’s instead of a magic bullet, it’s a magic shotgun, meaning multiple compounds, multiple receptors, multiple targets. With plant-based medicine, you can activate multiple receptors, and that allows us to lower drug loads, allows us to modulate particular symptoms. It allows us to reduce side effects. It’s really important when you’re thinking about more complex diseases such as neurological disorders, such as cancer.

The cannabinoid case study I think is really interesting. Most people know the cannabis plant as weed, as what you get high from. In the cannabinoid or in the cannabis plant, you have over 100 cannabinoids. You have hundreds of flavonoids and terpenoids. It’s essentially a factory for plant-derived chemicals.

I think we all see the trend. I think after COVID, everyone’s a little bit upset at the pharmaceutical companies, pharmaceutical industry, so there’s certainly cultural post COVID paradigm shift. People wanting to have better strong immunity, want to have less reliance on chemicals, less reliance on pharmaceuticals. So there’s certainly that.

This is the United States where it’s not federally legal to sell medical cannabis or recreational cannabis. But you can see at a state level, most of the states are now medical or adult use. Canada’s been fully legal for many years and there’s gaps to that as well, but there’s certainly a cultural movement and in Germany, I think you guys are about a year away from legalization of recreational cannabis.

Not something I recommend, but it’s an interesting trend to see. So patient advocacy is an important one. In Canada, this was actually driven by epileptic patients and their parents demanding that if there is a solution for their kids, why do they not have access to it? This is being driven by veterans that have post-traumatic stress disorder. This is being driven by pain patients that want to reduce their opioid use.

I’m gonna go into an outlook. What are the current limitations of plant-based medicine? There’s probably people in this audience that are skeptical of what I’m talking about. So there is still cultural biases. There’s still cultural biases towards, this kid is up here talking about magic mushrooms and weed.

One of my biggest criticism of the industry or the movement towards plant medicine is mixing of recreational with medical.

So I actually believe countries need to slow down on the recreationalization and focus on the medical, cause that’s where the real value is.”